“IE6 is deprecated” — by whom? Have you got a source for this?
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Paul D. WaiteJul 29 '10 at 15:19

@Paul Microsoft itself says its out of date, so does about every single web developer ever. Microsoft itselft attempted to kill it. There was an update to xp eons ago that was IE7 but not everyone installed it it seems. At least I remember seeing that update.
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WalterJ89Jul 29 '10 at 16:36

3

This question has been asked multiple times all over all the SO sites. but I guess it had to be asked here
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WalterJ89Jul 29 '10 at 16:45

21 Answers
21

It completely depends on your user base. In my line of work we support local councils so we have to maintain IE6 support as their computers are generally out of date and won't be upgraded for some time. If you are developing for a cutting edge audience however, then IE6 support will be less necessary.

It is advised to make the website usable in IE6 by letting it degrade certain "unsupported" features gracefully. Just remember, dropping IE6 support will affect someone out there... it just depends whether you care or not.

Sadly, that's the case - we're working on a major rebuild at the moment for a client, and pretty much 30% of their user base is still on IE6, which is a shame.
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Zhaph - Ben DuguidJul 9 '10 at 7:39

3

I feel your pain on local councils. In fact, most of the public sector in the UK still uses IE6, including some large government organisations I can't name for contractual reasons, but who deal with high-level crime and security.
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Dan DiploJul 23 '10 at 19:32

7

To prove my point read the response from HM Gov with respect to the IE6 Petition: "It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users" hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/…
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Dan DiploJul 30 '10 at 11:25

1

Yeah, sure. It may be cost-effective to continue using I.E 6, however, when will this stop? They just keep delaying the inevitable; They're going to have to upgrade sooner or later, and if they upgrade now, they'll probably save time and money in the long-run.
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JasonOct 28 '10 at 7:44

@Zhaph! Not shame, can be said as your bad luck?
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IsmailSDec 1 '10 at 10:12

The serious answer is to evaluate your users and customers for what they use, and the traffic and usage patterns for MSIE6 in that. You also need to decide how many is enough, can you make your site work "good enough" for IE6, or do things break down functionally for them. You can consider IE conditional comments for cosmetic things. For functionality problems, you may give your users a warning about when you will shut down IE6 access. You might also use something like ie6-upgrade-warning to give them some alternatives. Be mindful though, that some corporate users won't have enough permission to download and install a new browser, so being a jerk about "get out there and upgrade you lazy bum! your browser is 8 years old!" may turn off your users.

If you're working on a contract or freelance basis, this is entirely up to you. I use a version of the Internet Explorer 6 Contract Adendum by Jonathan Christopher of Monday By Noon.

As described by the Author:

This contract addendum acts as a notification to clients regarding your (limited) support of Internet Explorer. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This document is currently at version 1.0 and will more than likely be updated quite often until version 2.0 is reached.

I have not seen it updated since I found it, but that's really not important since it was the concept and the basic language that I used before tweaking it. Essentially in the form presented on the site it says that you will create a version of the site for IE6 that presents the info that needs presenting, though not necessarily using the approved design. Also that you reserve the right to feed them motivation to upgrade their browser.

Depending on the client and the project, you can just have it say that IE6 will not be supported, that you will deliver support for IE6 as a second-phase deliverable, at extra cost, or offer complete support.

If you choose to support IE6 you can mitigate some of the issues with lack of feature support using the following resources:

html5shiv: a JavaScript shiv for IE to recognize and style the HTML5 elements.

CSS3 Pie: an IE attached behavior (an .htc file) that makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features. When applied to an element, it allows IE to recognize and display border-radius, box-shadow, border-image, multiple background images, and linear-gradient as background image.

Modernizr: a Javascript library that uses feature detection to test the current browser against upcoming CSS3/HTML5 features, adding classes to the <html> element for those which are supported. Also creates a self-titled global JavaScript object which contains a boolean property for each feature, true if supported and false if not. Adds support for styling and printing HTML5 elements so you can use elements such as <section>, <header> and <nav>.

ie-css3.js: allows Internet Explorer to identify CSS3 pseudo-class selectors and render any style rules defined with them. Supports different CSS3 selectors based on which JavaScript library your site uses.

DD_belatedPNG: a Javascript library that adds PNG image support to IE6. You can use PNGs as the src of an <img /> element or as a background-image property in CSS. Unlike AlphaImageLoader, background-position and background-repeat work as intended, and elements will respond to the a:hover pseudo-class.

Whatever:hover: an IE attached behavior (an .htc file) that automatically patches :hover, :active and :focus for IE6, IE7 and IE8 quirks, letting you use them like you would in any other browser. Includes AJAX support, meaning that any html that gets inserted into the document via javascript will also trigger :hover, :active and :focus styles in IE.

Interesting to note that DD_belatedPNG solves both issues addressed by Whatever:hover and TwinHelix's IE PNG Fix with pure JavaScript, while Whatever:hover and TwinHelix's IE PNG Fix use a combination of JavaScript and IE attached behaviors (.htc files).

And a few resources identifying IE rendering issues you're most likely to encounter, along with their most common fixes:

I usually modify mine to exclude support for IE6. For the reasons stated already (Microsoft bent on killing it, age, user share, Google dropping support, investment of time required, etc.) I don't find it worth my time. And if you present these reasons to clients, they usually won't find that extra time it worth their extra money.
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BrysonJul 9 '10 at 6:53

That is not the answer to his question. He didn't really ask how to support IE6, but if it's worth the work...
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Tom PažourekAug 4 '10 at 13:47

1

There is not really any answer to his question to be total correct, because support must firt be defined. At the beginning of the article it says, "How do you answer the Internet Explorer 6 question?" defining the context of the question. Which, if I'm not wrong, is the same question asked here.
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Kevin D.Aug 4 '10 at 22:49

It is really time to get people to upgrade. You can use things like http://matijabozic.com/IE6-Notification/ if you really want to show people there are other options and that they need to move forward. As Google is even removing IE6 support from their products, it is time we all do the same.

One answer I don't see very often is expectation management in conjunction with graded support. We have reached a point where, as a generalization, IE6 users are aware their browser is out of date but for various reasons are unable to upgrade. So the question shifts from one of education to a much better one for us - to what degree to these users understand and expect the web to be broken for them?

Based on my experience, there is a general expectation among these users that web sites will not work at 100%. So the first half of battle is in our favor. For the remainder, we can take a graded-support approach. It helps to make a grid of "function or aesthetic" x "IE6 effort" and present that to stakeholders. You can often come up with a viable B-level or C-level grade of support for IE6 users that makes sense for your audience and your stakeholders can live with.

It all depends on your target audience. Will the people you are building your site for expect IE6 to work? Will they be put off if it doesn't? I would suggest using customer focused decision making on questions like this rather than technical. Get to know your customers and plan accordingly.

IE6 Falls Below 5% for First Time in
US and Europe However, globally
he suggested that web designers were
not out of the woods yet. "If your
target market is Asia then IE6 still
has 20.8% usage. IE8 has only just
overtaken it in Asia." Africa also
continues to have high levels of usage
of IE6.

If I had a dollar for every time my clients misjudged their audience. "They're tech saavy" the client will say. Sure, but they do their viewing on a government-issued PC running IE 6 at 800X600 during work. Voila, my client just lost a customer! In this business, we just can't afford to assume.
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bpeterson76Jul 30 '10 at 22:35

I agree that customer bases can be misjudged. But, it comes down to choosing to hit 70% of a very large base or a small niche where it will take 95% or better to make a profit. If you need to hit the full market, support IE 6. If you get all 70% of the larger market and need new customers, you are looking at a niche and can add IE 6 support.
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Larry SmithmierJul 31 '10 at 22:28

There are practical ways around the problem of supporting this decrepit old browser. The two major compatibility headaches are Javascript support and CSS support.

Javascript support can be remedied through the use of libraries such as jQuery. This will allow code to work cross-platform (even if it runs a lot more slowly) and means that only one group (the jQuery authors) have to worry about making it work. Everyone else gets to benefit from their work.

CSS support can be remedied through the use of a CSS framework such as Blueprint. CSS frameworks are not universally popular, but if you need something to "just work" and you aren't too fussed about including some rather obscure class names in your HTML, they speed up cross-browser development and remove all the guesswork. If you don't want to use a framework, good CSS Reset scripts are availablefrommanyplaces.

As much as I believe that people should be discouraged from using IE6 as far as possible, I like just being able to not worry about it. Instead, I can move on to the next problem or project.

+1; I don't know why this was downvoted. It's pretty similar to most of the other answers here, and is also good advice. I stopped supporting I.E 6 early last year, and when asked to make a new project compatible with I.E6 I simply respond with "No, upgrade your browser. It won't kill you." followed by the reasons why it will be better for them.
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JasonOct 28 '10 at 7:54

IE6 is so far behind the other browsers, it's barely worth supporting. The big catch is that you may have to anyway, if you have a large corporate audience, or other situation where that version is still likely to be used.

Besides, IE9 is on the way, and has a third preview edition available now. Once that is available, do you really want to still support IE6? That will be four versions to support. I'd suggest slowly phasing out IE6 support if you can.

When building an app for a customer you have to support what they need but when I build a public web site for home users I figure if they want to be backwards they don't have to see the site correctly.

If google, Microsoft, Facebook etc... all stopped supporting IE6 then why should I have to support it.

On a more technical note. If you use clean html and css without any fancy positioning and lots of JS effects your site will look fine in IE6 anyway.